


Nobody's Angel

by tiboribi



Category: Code Name Verity - Elizabeth Wein
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-23
Updated: 2013-12-23
Packaged: 2018-01-05 16:20:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,703
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1096042
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tiboribi/pseuds/tiboribi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The secret diary of Anna Engel</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nobody's Angel

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Assimbya](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Assimbya/gifts).



> Many thanks to my beta readers J Rios and E Gatland.

_Ormaie_  
3 December 1944  
My dear Maddie,  
I am spending the week unexpectedly in France and went to Ormaie to pay my respects to our Julie. It is so different this time around, I am staying with my great aunt and I don’t have to hide. 

_I was greeted by "Mitraillette," who handed me this packet of paper. “We found it in Anna Engel’s apartment after she went back to Berlin,” she said, “Can you pass this onto Kathe Habicht?_

_Thine ain true  
Jamie_

_14 October 1943_

The entire city has been crawling, looking for the English spy they are worried might have somehow survived the plane crash. Etienne has been particularly wretched, the plane crashed in his family’s field, and he’s started bullying the prisoners more than ever to prove his loyalty.

I’m sure that’s why they thought to arrest that girl when they pulled her away from the van of chickens. I hate chloroforming their prisoners, but as the Gestapo slave girl with knowledge of pharmaceuticals, I am still required to do detestable things like knocking out a tiny fierce blonde girl. She held out against four policemen.

Her papers say she is Margaret Brodatt, a pilot for the Air Transport Auxiliary.

1872-4. It was written on her hand. I don’t know what it is -- an address? Maybe where she is staying?

_31 October 1943_

Etienne is a moron. If von Linden suspected his family of working with the local Resistance, he would have had them arrested three weeks ago, when the plane crashed. He would not let them continue to quietly raise chickens. And he would CERTAINLY not keep up the monthly dinners. Although, I must say, Mme. Thibaut’s meals are the best thing we eat each month. Of course, Etienne is still embarrassed that our captured spy slugged him with a doorknob when he was leaving an interrogation two days ago.

Amelie spent the entire evening cooing over her brutish thug of an older brother, who refused of course to tell her that the giant cut on his forehead was put there by a girl who can throw as fast and hard as a baseball player. When von Linden talks to Amelie, when he gives her tiny gifts, he must be thinking of his own daughter.

Gabriele-Therese is the most uncomfortable of all the family when we descend for these monthly dinners. We sit in the corner and don’t talk to anyone much; as the driver, I am probably not meant to be included in these meals at all, but they always feed me as much as they feed any of the officers. 

Our prisoner swore when she woke up that she is not Margaret Brodatt, not a pilot, but a wireless operator for the WAAF. She is properly Flight Officer Julia Beaufort-Stuart. She kept trying to escape from her first cell, and did manage to scramble out the window above her locked door. She was halfway down the hall before she was cornered by dogs and guards and moved into the room just outside the interrogation room; it is more closely guarded. And there she tried to strangle herself with her flimsy silk scarf and stockings, and we had to take them away. How could she possibly still have silk stockings?

 _1 November 1943_  
I am usually spared watching the interrogations, but she is English and I am the only one who speaks English, so I have been in the room with them while they try to get her to talk.

Scottish. She is Scottish. It was the only thing she would tell them today, despite nearly drowning her in ice water and sticking pins under her perfectly shaped fingernails and in her breasts.

 _4 November 1943_  
Lazy bastards. They left some of the pins in her when they put her back in her cell after the first day. It was their own fault, really, that she picked the lock and tried again to run away. They took her back to her cell, beat her until she couldn’t walk, and took away her clothes. They had to drag her into the interrogation room the next morning.

I have dreamt about those poor Polish women every night since she was arrested. Horrible dreams. Not just sharpening knives or giving them stolen morphine to dull the pain, but making the cuts, holding their bones. Watching them drag her in that morning, I couldn’t stop thinking about those women. But she is so determined; she had a mad glint in her eye. She has information von Linden wants, and she knows it.

He was so calm and cool, asking her for wireless codes for the eleven radio sets that were in her plane, never giving verbal orders to the underlings as they burnt holes in her wrists and neck. When she vomited into her long hair, and still refused to give up code he ordered her to be tied up to the chair and stalked out of the room. He hasn’t been back in the room for days.

I haven’t been her only guard, but I have had to stay close, sleeping in the office downstairs, in case she decides to start talking. He has ordered that she be given glucose injections, just like the we gave those Polish women in Ravensbruck. As they make no pretense of doing this for “medical research,” there is no morphine to slip her. When we are alone, I have snuck her water and cigarettes. She LAUGHED when I first gave her a cigarette, and asked, “Are we to be friends, then, Fraulein Engel?”

She pays such close attention, to have learned my name while they were doing their best to get her as close to breaking point as they dared. I am not sure what possessed me to say, “Well, if we are to be friends, Flight Officer Beaufort-Stuart, my name is Anna.”

It is good that I practice my English in my diary; if von Linden were ever to find it, I would be sent off to one of the camps myself, for hiding evidence and sympathizing with a prisoner.

 _8 November 1943_  
She gave up on Friday. Von Linden hasn’t been in the room for days, it has been Flight Officer Beaufort-Stuart, a wretched boy they suspect of being part of the Resistance and various goons doing unimaginably horrible things to that boy while she watched. One of the goons went running for von Linden when she finally, exhaustedly, agreed to tell them what she knows.

Before they untied her, she explained the complicated method they use to code messages based on poems. Then they untied her and let her back into her cell, alone with her pullover. I sat all weekend there, listening with pen in hand, writing reams of poems and frequency codes as she fumbles through the verses. (1872-4 is not a frequency code. It was not the address of the hotel she was staying at either, when we eventually found her room and her two million francs. Maybe it is her code name or the address of one of her contacts.)

Having given up the codes and having all her clothes back (well, not anything she could harm herself with, not the stockings or silk scarf, and certainly not her hairpins), she has bought herself two more weeks by agreeing to tell them everything she knows. They have given her a list of things she should consider of interest.  
I am to translate what she writes. She wrote pages and pages today, all about Margaret Brodatt, the name on the ID that had been in her pocket. Nothing of herself, but she has given up some  
information about planes and airfields.

 _9 November 1943_  
I most certainly did NOT tell her that we execute enemy spies by forcing them to drink kerosene and then lighting a match. Weiser had been making threats about kerosene. During the air raid I explained that I’d heard of someone who tried to execute a Jew at Natzweiler that way but found that it didn’t work. People will try anything; but you can put kerosene in your cooking, it wouldn’t be an effective way to execute someone. I threw matches at her, laughing as she flinched. COULDN’T SHE TELL SHE WASN’T GOING TO GO UP IN FLAMES?

She has still not written a single word about herself. They are going to take her paper away.

 _11 November 1943_  
Flight-Officer Beaufort-Stuart has written so much about this Brodatt girl she has run out of paper. We are out of paper. We expect to win a war and we cannot keep ourselves in PAPER. There was a bit of a scramble until someone managed to produce the prescription pad from an arrested Jewish doctor. She laughed and laughed, and did prescriptions for me. Who could I possibly date in this town, really, all the Germans are bullies, and none of the Frenchmen would dare to be seen with me.

I did one for her, and she filled in a few pieces. I am copying it out here, and then I will burn the evidence of this theft.

Nom: Flight Officer Julia Beaufort-Stuart “You can call me Julie”  
Date: 22 November 1943 (That is her deadline)  
Rx: A daring rescue, and aspirin, a blanket and a proper meal.  
Medecin: A foolheardy Maquis team.  
Rep: This would be a one time cure

 _13 November 1943_  
The photographer has delivered more photographs of the plane yesterday. There is no doubt that the pilot is dead. I would have liked to have met Maddie Brodatt.

 _16 November 1943_  
Von Linden has decided to allow Georgia Penn to come tour the hotel. More propaganda to show that things are not so bad in our prisons as the BBC keeps saying or some such nonsense. She will be given a tour, shown the newest prisoners, and will be allowed an interview with Flight Officer Beaufort-Stuart.

Julia is running a fever and is crawling with nits. None of the prisoners had nits before she got here. She’s been almost starved for a month and a half. Most of the damage they did to her during her interrogation is hidden under her sleeves and skirt, but you can’t look at her wrist and hands without knowing that she’s been tortured. We are cleaning her up before Georgia Penn comes, kill her nits with kerosene and giving her aspirin to bring her fever down. And he’s approved giving her one of the blankets from the days when this was a hotel.

The stench in her room is AWFUL. It clings to her when we bring her out of the room. Ms. Penn is bound to notice. Maybe they will let her take a bath.

 _19 November 1943_  
Georgia Penn has had her tour of our facility and her interview with Julia.

They did have her take a bath, while they laundered her underthings and blouse; her sweater is beyond hope. She was to be cleaned up with soap that smells like something she might have chosen, not clinical or carbolic, and, as the Ormaie Gestapo’s only woman, they asked me if I had anything. I brought her a piece of the floating soap I have been hoarding since I left Chicago.

I wish I had never left Chicago. I could be working as a pharmacist in Chicago, rather than being the office slave in a torture chamber.

I did her nails. She is so underfed, her hair is coming out in clumps, her nails are paper thin and ragged after the pins. We soaked them in kerosene to try to remove all the stains, ink and otherwise, and I brought in my own scissors and file. Just before as I was about to start filing her nails, she looked me straight in the eye, gave me a ghost of a smile and giant, conspiratorial wink, then spent the entire manicure crying.

Georgia Penn! She does that ridiculous radio show we listen to, full of jazz music and talking about how well we Germans are doing in the war. She is such a ridiculous turncoat traitor to the Americans, which is surely how she convinced von Linden to let her in. But she was clearly looking for Julia. They conducted the entire interview in English, not French which von Linden could have understood, or German, which Ms. Penn does not seem to actually speak. Julia was a BALL OF NERVES but so deft at passing out bits of information without von Linden knowing.

“Why, I do nothing some days but recite doggerel,” she told Ms. Penn.

And me. When they needed an ashtray (I am going broke keeping Julia in cigarettes when we are alone, at least someone else is giving her cigarettes), she said, “Ah, Engel is the Angel of the Ashtray. She is always on my side, taking care of me.” I do keep helping her hide things from von Linden, although she is CONSTANTLY trying to get me in trouble, too.

 _22 November 1943_  
She was right, of course I am on her side. I didn’t know HOW FAR I was willing to go to help her until the interview with Ms. Penn. But today I stole the key to the service door in the back, and pressed it into the bar of soap I’d brought in for her interview. I don’t know what I’m going to do with it, I have no idea how to get it to anyone in the maquis. Maybe one of them will reach out to me. And, Julia. I was organizing and numbering her endless recipe cards, with imprint of the key hidden in my bag, when Etienne brought her in and she shouted: _“Achtung, Anna Engel, heil Hitler!”_ WRETCHED GIRL. I am RISKING MY LIFE to save her from an inevitable and painful death, and she calls out my treasons in front of Etienne. I slugged her. She is so tiny, so weak from this imprisonment that she just fell over. And I had Etienne tie her to the chair more tightly than ever. 

_23 November 1943_  
I must have put the key back in the wrong drawer. Von Linden suspects us all and has been interrogating us all fiercely. He stormed at me and threatened to have me sent as a traitor to one of the camps.

Ferber has found out about both the mislaid key and Georgia Penn’s tour. I don’t know if Julia knows how much trouble von Linden could get into over that interview, but her revelation yesterday about her work masquerading as “Berlin’s interpretive liaison” was a blessing.

I have am going to have to experiment to figure out how to copy the key from the soap. I wonder if I can melt down hairpins.

 _25 November 1943_  
Everyone was in a tizzy when I arrived at work, but no one would tell me WHY von Linden had ordered Julia’s mouth to be burned with phenol. Phenol is nasty, it can be an antiseptic cleaner, but it burns, and they kill with it in the camps, it is faster and cheaper for individual executions than gas. I found ice cubes for her, for after, to soothe the burns.

They took her away from me before she had finished writing for the day, leaving Maddie’s plane “stuck in a climb,” dragged her out leaving my careful phenol preparation where it sat, and tied her to the French girl they’ve been unable to force any information out of. Really, Julia should have never told von Linden her ten biggest fears. Of course he would use them against her if he could, and killing the French girl right in front of her would devastate her. It was probably more effective than the threat of the phenol. After, von Linden himself sat guard as she sat, covered in blood, to finish her story.

_Kathe,_

_This is all we could find in the apartment of l’Ange now that she’s left Ormaie. She writes so much about Verity that I hope we can get it to you. You are always welcome at our farm, Kathe, when the war is over, please do come visit._

_Paix,  
Mitraillette_

**Author's Note:**

> The title is borrowed from Nanci Griffith.


End file.
